an ent knits

january planning

I'm not making any yarn-related new year's resolutions, but it's about time for me to review my progress and short-term goals again.  Since the last time I did this, I have finished all of four and a half knitting projects (the autumn sunset shawl, the blue Dulaan hat, the garter-stitch scarf for my labmate, the spirit-trail fire sock (which is the half I was counting), and my lace headband thing).  I've also finished a few spinning projects, with the green romney and the spirit-trail merino/mohair being the most notable.

I am currently (within the last two months) working on the following projects:

• diamond fantasy shawl
• green mohair cabled scarf
• lorna's fire sock
• green freeform blanket
• alien-and-black hat for my dad
• purple hat for either my grandmother or Dulaan
• orange hat for me

• silk in "walking on the sun"
• purple, grey-brown, and purple-grey-brown yarn
• super-secret yarn for the Spin to Knit handspun swap
• orange mohair/wool

And I am planning to start the following projects sometime soon in the foreseeable future:

• Norberta, for my cousin L.  (by either Passover or October)
    red and gold cascade 220
• wristwarmers for my mom (by mid-March)
    the merino-mohair I spun
• half-finger gloves for use in lab (soon!)
    mossy green lorna's
• peacock feather shawl
    Boogie laceweight
• shadow-neuron scarf
    this I've started already, in KnitPicks WotA, but I need to rip it out and restart with fewer stitches
• a leafy shawl that I need to convert to a triangle from a rectangular lace pattern
    my green grafton handspun
• a sweater for me!  that fits well and which I will wear!
    (probably) the chocolate brown elann wool that I've had for this purpose for way too long
• the orange mohair/wool shawl that's been in my plans for the last year and a half
    the orange mohair from MDSW05 and the wool/mohair I've been spinning to go with it
• if I'm sticking with my plan from October or November, I should include a pair of Tess socks on this list

So...I want to finish at least the gift hats and the sock from my current-projects list before I start anything else.  The wristwarmers, the half-finger gloves, and the orange mohair shawl are up next, with the Tess socks as mindless knitting for concerts and trolleys.  I should also note that I have the yarn for all of those, not counting the bit that I have to finish spinning, so I shouldn't have any trouble not buying yarn before Maryland.

playing catch-up

I am in the middle of a just-over-two-week period which has/had all of three days, I think, with nothing [social] scheduled.  I wound up cancelling some of my plans and diverting an evening or two to alternate plans, but things have been busy.  There've been lots of things to blog, but very little time with which to do so.  Here, then, since I am still quite busy, are a few bits.

Food.  After the end of the One Local Summer challenge, I decided that my next cooking challenge would be to cook "real food" at least once, preferably twice, each week.  It hasn't been going as well as I'd've liked, but I'm still working at it.  Last week, however, I managed twice, with one meal large batch of food being mostly local, and one batch of food being OLS-compliant.  Here's a picture of the partly-local food, in its reincarnation as lunch:

That's sautéed local rainbow chard, with bulgar salad adapted from Mac's recipe--the carrots were local, the cranberries, almonds, and bulgar were not.  (I also toss in a good bit of sumac in this stuff, but it can be hard to find.)   The other batch of cooking was locally made whole wheat linguine with local tofu, carrots, and broccoli.  I still have some left, and it turns out to be much better with [local] cheese.

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Plants--because what kind of catch-up post from me would it be without at least one picture of a plant?

This year, my christmas cactus decided to honor Veterans' Day.  I had hoped, when I saw the buds, that it would be a birthday cactus, but 'twas not to be.  Still, I'm always happy to have flowers on my plants, especially as they're getting scarcer outside.

Fiber.  The conspiracy is sucking me further in.  I have now played with handcards, and it was fun. 

Three rolags from last night, hanging out at Sarah's, with a 20p coin for scale (a bit bigger than a US nickel).  Pretty much all wool, with a couple of teensy bits of alpaca and silk, mostly the brown corriedale I bought when I first got my spindle and then decided wasn't pretty enough or enough fun to spin.  I like it a lot better now.  (It doesn't show up all that well, but the rolag on the far left is sorta greyish-brownish-greenish, and the middle rolag is reddish-brownish-slightly purple.)

ECF: shadows

I love shadows in bright sunlight.

Now, because none of them are really enough for their own posts, here are a few things I've done since last I posted anything other than pictures:

• I went dancing, where (so she said) a friend of mine almost didn't recognize me because I wasn't knitting.

• I got the orange hat halfway through the crown decreases and then realized I'd started them too soon. (I also ripped back to where I'd started decreasing, but haven't really gotten back to the knitting part.)

• I went to NYC for depressing family reasons but felt (somewhat) better for getting to see my family.

• I read The Golden Compass, a few of the Fables comics, bits of a couple of other books, and reread both Leaven of Malice and What's Bred in the Bone. And I did a few crossword puzzles.

• I've spun some more of the orange mohair-wool and knit a few more rows on the Diamond Fantasy Shawl.

• I've cooked four different kinds of food this week. I made my version of sweet potato fries, baked soy-ginger-garlic tofu, scrambled eggs with peppers and corn, and, last night, an entirely local lamb curry. Mmmm. (In addition to lamb, I used onion, garlic, chard, spinach, broccoli, a carrot, and a pepper.)

paid knitting time!

One of the extra fun bonus things about yesterday was our scheduled "evacuation" drill. (Evacuation is in quotes because we evacuated as far as one floor down in the fire exit stairway, where we stood for about twenty minutes.) How could that possibly be fun, you ask? Because I was prepared! I grabbed my earplugs and my bag, which contained my knitting. So I got to stand around and knit on the orange hat, while the alarm noises were somewhat muted. My labmates got bored, though, being less prepared, so one of them played with my camera (also in my bag) for a while.

People Standing In the Fire Exit Stairs. (No, I'm not sure why she only actually took this one picture. It looked like she was taking lots more, but this was the only one that got recorded.)

bits and pieces

Before I forget, here is the link I mentioned at Fiber Night last week: Grover is Bitter, courtesy of Norma.

Also, last week was a reasonably productive week in terms of baking, although I didn't do any other cooking. But here's a picture of the entirely vegan, margarine-free, chocolate-raspberry layer cake I made for a friend's birthday on Sunday:

And I've now passed the 5000-mark on my digital camera. Five thousand pictures, in about three and a half years, a lot of them for various blogging purposes. Huh.

One last bit--the recipe for the chocolate-orange cookies I made last week is in the extended entry.

uh-oh.

I found moths in my apartment, and not the mealmoths I've been fighting away from my grain products. Wool-eating moths.

It took some hunting to find their nest of evil, hidden under lots of plant-fiber clothing, but it was in a sweater that I'd've sworn was 100% acrylic. Turns out that the sweater was 30% wool. I would be distraught right now, rather than merely upset, but the infestation seems (*knocking on wood*) to have been confined to the part of my bedroom by the back windows (incidentally, the only part of my apartment of which I've posted pictures), and the only yarn I've thrown out has been some ecowool. But my freezer is now stuffed full of yarn, fiber, my highland triangle shawl, and a (woven) wool stole I bought a while ago. And my mountain peaks shawl, which is the only really sad bit--I saw a moth in the project bag and shoved it into the freezer without looking any further. The final determination can be made when I'm not worried about spreading moths. My Sunday afternoon also took on a lot more laundry than it was supposed to have included, as I washed everything that might've been hiding moths. (Including a wool sweater I'd gotten for free a few years ago, which is now actually close to the right size.)

I haven't done an exhaustive search of my yarn and fiber stashes this afternoon, but I'm reasonably confident that there's no major infestation in either, what with the number of times lately that I've poked through them, and the nasty little caterpillars were at the opposite end of my apartment. The thorough stash inspections are going to come after the exposed clothing is back out of the way.

I am now cautiously optimistic. But someone should tell me immediately if the freeze-thaw-freeze system is insufficient.

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In happier news, I have started three new knitting projects since I finished the autumn sunset shawl. Two scarves and a blanket. Because I am crazy. But one of the scarves is a really simple cable pattern in the fuzziest mohair ever, and the other is the neuron-illusion scarf I've been meaning to start for the last year. And the blanket is a freeform thing combining all of the green yarn I could pull out of my stash: mostly single skeins that were gifts, all small enough quantities that I couldn't do much with them by themselves. It's coming along nicely, and I'm weaving in ends as I go...so it seems a little less insane than it could be.

And here are a couple of pictures of the mohair scarf, since it both 1)looks like something and 2)fits in the sunny corner of my windowsill.

nothing to see

I will not be making local food this week, nor do I anticipate posting for Eye Candy Friday--I'm off to a meeting for the rest of the week. It should be fun, and it will definitely be exciting. And I'll have time to knit in the car on the way there and back. *grin*

more aquarium pics

I've knit a bit more on my diamond fantasy shawl, started yet another handspun hat for Dulaan (this one's gonna be striped), and spun more merino and more wool from Grafton fibers. But I don't have pictures of any of that.

I do, however, have more pictures from my aquarium trip last Saturday:

These upside down jellyfish are pretty cool. (And they were in tanks with plenty of light, unlike the rest of the jellyfish. I think jellyfish are amazing as long as I'm not worried about being stung by them...)

These were some of my favorites of the coral reef fish.

And this seal seemed to have the right idea of what to do on a hot, sunny July day. (Not that I would've argued against the "playing in the water" idea that some of the other seals were advocating.)

Today, thank goodness, it's finally pleasant out--fifteen degrees cooler and not deathly humid. I hope it stays like this a while.

hey, look!

I have knitting to show! Not all that much of it is recent, but I've resumed work on my ginormous green to-be-felted totebag:

Lest it decide to swallow my cat and start engulfing my armchair, I think I'm going to start the handles/straps after I finish the skein I joined on Saturday. It'll be really nice to have this thing done...whenever that actually happens.

And...I know, my stated plan was to spin and knit from my stash and what I bought at Maryland and not buy more fiber until Rhinebeck, but I couldn't resist this:

A very kind, generous person offered to buy roving mill-ends from Brown Sheep, at their factory, and send them to various other people at her cost. And I'm not to a point of being able to refuse pretty roving at $7/lb. So I now have two pounds of wool in that lovely cranberry color. I'm hoping it'll turn into a sweater.

And, to continue the red, and just because it was there, I present a photo of one of the poppies I bought at the farmers' market last Saturday:

priorities

I have moved. There are still odds and ends (and all of my plants) at my old apartment, but I'm officially living at my new apartment now. I moved some essentials over on Saturday evening, and then devoted all of Sunday to moving (nearly all of) the rest of my stuff. Hiring movers for the furniture was a wonderful, wonderful idea... But last night was devoted to rearranging boxes and furniture--I only unpacked one or two boxes, maybe three if you count the "immediate kitchen stuff" box I unpacked this morning so I could make coffee. At this point, most of the stuff that belongs in the living room is in the living room, and most of the boxes in the bedroom either belong there or will eventually find homes in the kitchen. I was keeping most of the kitchen free so my landlord could install the washer and dryer this morning (!!). So, the four hours I spent reorganizing boxes and getting about half the furniture into the right places meant no knitting, but I have one picture from Saturday night to share:

if you click, it'll get slightly larger

Yes, that's the wheel set up before I unrolled my new mattress. (Of course, the only thing that hasn't been moved in the moving-in and rearranging process is the lamp...)

And, while I'm posting, here's the big excitement from a week or so before the intensive packing:

My christmas cactus, which I've had for about four years, finally decided to bloom this May. I'm not sure whether it wanted to be a Mothers' Day cactus or a Memorial Day cactus, but it made me happy. I mean, I like having green plants around, and I don't object to the all-green flowers that some of them have, but it's nice when the plants that are supposed to have colorful flowers actually do so.